Successes - Kings County
California Municipality Gains Efficiency with Westbrook Technologies’ Fortis

First introduced to Kings County Human Services department in 1997 to replace an existing software system that had become too costly and difficult to use, Westbrook Technologies’ Fortis has since been implemented in 11 additional departments and has become the standard document management solution for this California municipal government entity.

The number of users at the County has surpassed 300 among the various departments which include the Sheriff’s Office (civil and criminal); Human Services; Family Services; Recorder; clerk of the Board; and offices of the Assessor; District Attorney; Treasurer; Auditor; Elections; and Probation.

Sheriff’s Office Criminal Branch – Simplifying document retrieval by 97 percent

Using Fortis, the criminal branch of the Sheriff’s Office created an automated system for criminal reports, with access to diagrams of traffic accidents, blood alcohol printouts and write-ups and disciplinary reports from county jail bookings. These documents are quickly retrieved for court proceedings, law suits, investigative purposes, prosecution by the district attorney or by order of a judge.

Linda Blaha, Communications Records manager, said Fortis simplified the document retrieval process by 97 percent. “Originally, access to these documents was about a half-mile away in a storage facility and someone would leave our office and walk or drive over. Once there, that person requested a clerk pull the paperwork, pay for a copy or take it back to the office and make the copy then return it. This process could take up to 45 minutes or more.”

The Sheriff’s Office is expanding its use of Fortis to help with California Penal Code Section 290 compliance - the law requiring people convicted of certain sexual offenses to register with the local law enforcement agency responsible for the jurisdiction in which they reside. Currently, the Sheriff’s Office must maintain registrants’ records for five years after they leave the County. However, in conjunction with Megan’s Law - which gives police the ability to notify neighborhoods and residents of the existence of serious offenders - changing legislation will eventually dictate the files are never purged from the system. “With this in mind, Fortis is a great solution for us,” said Blaha. “We’re planning ahead and these files will be scanned into our system and readily available no matter how much time passes.”

Assessor’s Office – Reducing 30-60 day wait on property deed requests

The use of Fortis at the Assessor’s office has reduced the amount of time it takes to locate property deeds for residents. It no longer takes 30-60 days to complete a request, now that staff can look up changes of ownership information from their desktop. Assistant Assessor Clerk Recorder Ken Baird said, “The Assessor, Clerk and Recorder offices are all under one department head. Initially, this department started using Fortis to archive documents including legal files, property transfers and deeds. With Fortis, we instantly access these documents right from our desktops.” Each property deed is accompanied by the change of ownership form that is used when assessing property. “We were able add many of the discarded property records to our Fortis system so accessing historical information is now possible using assigned parcel numbers. Originally, they were microfilmed in batches, which required the date for locating them. When we needed a record, we had to check in over a dozen places and finding the record was not always the outcome. This searching used to take up to an hour or more,”Baird explained. That is a 180 percent reduction in time spent accessing information.

As geographical parcel maps are created, they are also saved into Fortis. “It was very inconvenient to have to pull the map book out, search for a map then find out it didn’t exist or had been discarded. Now, we can pull the map from our system and even mark them up using the annotation feature,” said Baird.

In conjunction with the Williamson Act - which encourages land owners to keep their land in agricultural production by providing them with a tax deduction – completed questionnaires returned to the office by land owners are scanned and kept in the Assessor’s Fortis system, eliminating paper files and making them easily accessible by parcel number.

Fortis is integrated with the County’s business process management software used by the offices of the Assessor and the Recorder. If documents being recorded require action by the Assessor, the document is automatically sent to him. Human intervention is no longer needed to route the document. The system also launches the relevant action/process for that document and automates each of them through to completion.

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